It’s around this time that I hear a lot about “fresh starts”, resolutions, and the new year. Growing up, there have been two types of people in my life: those who place a lot of significance on this tradition, and those who treat it as any other, and for the longest time, I used to adhere to the latter. Why celebrate what is essentially the most basic and ultimately superfluous day of the year? The clock strikes 12 and the world more or less stays the same. To those people (including my younger self) I’d like to share with you what I’ve come to understand in my relatively brief time on this earth.

To put it bluntly, life is short. We humans occupy such an infinitesimal existence compared to trees, mountains, the vast reaches of Earth, our neighboring planets, or even our solar system. One thing I’ve heard from adults older than me is that time goes by quickly for them, and only recently have I come to really understand the full gravity of this statement. 4 years ago life as we know it stopped because of a global pandemic. 4 years ago the world health organization estimated that over 1.4 million people had died from COVID-19. And it was 4 years ago that well over a billion people were told to keep indoors for almost a year. 

With nothing else to do inside our homes after a while, many people, including myself, started looking inward and reflecting. We learned things about ourselves that we didn’t quite have the time to before about how little of our time was actually ours, what we care and don’t care about, and ultimately how time is ever transient. I speak for myself when I say that my experiences 4 years ago now feel both a lifetime ago, and just yesterday. 4 years: 1460 days have come and gone in a flash. Sometimes the thought of living so quickly frightens me; the pace is not something I think I’ll ever get used to. Average life expectancy for an adult is roughly 80-100 years. But with that said, I’ve come to count my blessings for just lucky I am to be living in the time that I am, because given the right decade, I may not have had the chance to live as long as I have even now. 

In 1999, the CDC released an article titled: “Achievements in Public Health, 1900-1999: Control of Infectious Disease”; in it, they discuss the rapid advancement of medical research, practice, and treatment in the field throughout the 20th century. A particularly poignant statement is made in the introductory paragraph when the article states: “In 1900, 30.4% of all deaths occurred among children aged less than 5 years; in 1997, that percentage was only 1.4%”(CDC 1999). Keeping in mind that this statistic has the U.S. population in mind, the fact still remains that life expectancy has only ever been on the upturn for only the past 100 years. 

The reason this is so poignant to me is how seemingly brief life used to be in the grand scheme of the universe. And to only recently make ourselves privy to just a little bit more of its scope is simply awe-inspiring. It is far too  easy to be trapped by the never ending waves of terrible news and negative events, I do it myself, but I’ve found that when you examine the aspects of existence that aren’t nearly as sensational or flashy or overtly advertised, that life is in fact very beautiful. 

Every year, my best friends and I make it a tradition to get together and spend a night with each other playing games, filming videos, sharing food, and taking the time to be with one another as we bring in the New Year. My favorite moments about these meetings is when the night slows down before the count down; it’s in these quiet moments where all of us take the time and reflect on ourselves, our year, and really take in the feeling of melancholic optimism. The future is forever the unexplored frontier, and to have them in my life as I explore it is a beautiful thing. If Christmas is a celebration of the love and joy we have with one another, then New Year’s is the celebration of a life filled with the beauty of love, joy, and the positivity of the human spirit; its life enduring despite the adverse effects of an overwhelming and chaotic series of circumstances. 

To close this out I’d like to share with you a fairly recent story: I was in the car last night listening to some Christmas music with my friend and the song Auld Lang Syne started playing. For those who aren’t aware, Auld Lang Syne is more commonly known as the New Years song and less a Christmas song. My friend driving the car talked about the lyrics because we’d never really considered the meaning behind the song:

The phrase Auld Lang Syne comes from the old Scots saying meaning: “Times long past”, or simply put, “For old times sake”. So what’s being asked here is “should the people (or possible other forgotten figures) in our past be left there”? And the reply is seemingly “For the times forgotten, my dear, we’ll drink to their health and wish them well”. 

This poem/song is the best encapsulation of the New Years tradition I can think of. It seemingly captures the melancholy of retiring the old year for the new while keeping an optimistic outlook on what’s to come. If things are to change, then let’s drink to the health of those who didn’t make it to this moment and wish those around us well. It’s beautiful.